The study of grammar, therefore, had to begin by learning the languages themselves, and then proceed to reading the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Latin was important to them, not for its own sake, but because it was the language of the books—no Latin was the equivalent of being illiterate. If you couldn’t read Latin, you couldn’t read at all. Very little was written in the common (vulgar) tongues, although this is the era in which we see the beginnings of literature in modern languages—Dante wrote in Italian, Chaucer wrote in English, and Montaigne in French, for example.
